RPG Errata: What Happens Next

“What happens next?”

It is, perhaps the pinnacle of the medium. All the preparation, all the imagination, all the dice and chips and conversation all depends on that one procedure, that game-loop, that single question.

What happens next?

We answer the question in a myriad of ways with a myriad of tools. We think of our characters, and what their emotions or worldviews might push them to do. We think about the story, and what might be fitting. We think of ourselves, and consider what we would find interesting or exciting. We think of our dice, and decide what actions are most likely to succeed. Sometimes, we are simply inspired.

But the question must be answered. If it is not, there is no game.

That’s a lot of pressure.

We’ve all experienced it. Whether it’s commonplace or rare may depend on your group, but every player has had at least one experience with that hitch, that screech of breaks, that record scratch: The GM asks “what do you do,” and there is a pregnant pause.

Paper is shuffled, eyes dart furtively, you make a show of thought when in fact your mind is blank, and you wonder if everyone else is in the same boat…

These hitches aren’t wrong. They aren’t a sign of bad players or a poorly run game. They’re unavoidable as a consequence of the improvisational nature of RPGs. One of the old cliches is “when asked to think of anything, I think of nothing.” Without guide-rails, parameters, or clear expectations, your mind draws a blank. You can pick anything. There is no wrong answer! And yet, no matter how creative we are, we stumble. We hem and haw. We scrabble in the void for disparate scraps of ideas, hoping they’ll congeal into something.

There is a horrible moment in theatre: the Dropped Line. Everything is proceeding as planned and then all of a sudden, silence on stage. The actors look at each other, expectant. Someone didn’t hear their cue. What to do?

For some players, the open-ended “What do you do next” causes the same issue. Without the guidelines of story or established goal, the idea of standing in the middle of a bustling world can be paralyzing.

Or perhaps it’s not a world full of life, but a terra nullius. Perhaps the paralysis comes not from a surplus of options, but a dearth. “You are in an empty room, what do you do?” is hardly a question conducive to an interesting or creative answer.

The game can only progress when the question is answered, so let’s see if there aren’t some game-design choices we can make to support its answering.

Now, I’m no psychologist, nor neurologist. I’m not about to give great answers to any of the natural questions arising from this situation, but I do have a few thoughts:

First off, either-or decisions are easier than multi-faceted decisions. That is: if you are choosing between two options instead of seven, that’s an easier decision to make. “Would you like pizza for dinner” is an easier question to answer than “what would you like to eat?” This can be hard to do in an open scenario, (You’re in the castle’s main hallway. There are seven doors and a set of stairs going both up and down. Do you go up the stairs? No? Do you go down? No? Do you…) And in conversation scenes it might be impossible. Nevertheless, sprinkling clear and obvious choices can put players in the mindset of choosing. (The fire has spread, so now the only exits that aren’t on fire or being swarmed with the zombies are the window and the fire-escape. What do you do?)

Conversations can, conversely, include choices in the form of questions. NPCs don’t necessarily know anything about the PCs, depending on the circumstances, and encouraging your players to respond through questioning can break them out of any blocks. (“Hail, strangers. You look like you’ve been on the road a good while. From whence came you?”)

There is, however, such a thing as a false choice. “The Dragon opens its mouth and breathes fire at you. What do you do?” Well, the obvious answer is “die,” unless there is a nice thick rock you can hide behind. While “take it on the chin” is always an available choice, available doesn’t always mean viable.

There are also situations where a description of the character’s actions would restrict the flow of the game. When meeting the Queen, having to state whether you enter the room proudly or hesitantly, when you bow, if you accept the tea or not…it could turn a political scene into an absurd stop-and-go round-table where everyone has to detail how assertively they lift their pinkie.

So, while “no answer is the wrong answer” is a perfectly true statement when it comes to RPGs, it is also true that some choices are “better” than others: at least, in the framework of a game that encourages smooth and constant play.

But even if you manage to clear our all the superfluous choices and craft perfectly leading questions, that still might not be enough because of one simple reason: your players don’t know who is supposed to talk.

Perhaps it’s my brain, but I have trouble knowing who is supposed to speak at any given time. In some cases, it’s obvious (When someone’s asking how hard it is to wear armor, the wizard can likely sit back for a bit.) but in others it can be open-ended. When the Duchess asks if you will take some refreshment, she’s talking to the group, not an individual. The group has to answer, and not wanting to step on anyone’s toes is a powerful paralytic.

As a problem, this particular issue has grown a bit in recent years because of the growth of Virtual Tabletop. When you’re in the same room as a bunch of other people, the atmosphere can do a bunch of the heavy lifting. Group awareness is much easier when you aren’t struggling with the disconnection of video-calls.¹ Watch any Let’s Play of an RPG, and note the difference between the online and real-life versions; they sound different.

Interestingly enough, this is a problem that has had a solution since the 70’s. In the first D&D rulebooks, jobs and duties were given to different players, including Map-keeper, Treasurer, and the Caller, whose job was to be the liaison between the GM and the rest of the table. Someone could say “I do this, that, or the other,” and the GM wouldn’t do or say anything until the Caller confirmed. It was their job to be the official sign-off on the PC’s actions in the fiction.

The Caller job eventually turned into the more amorphous and informal “face” of the party, who could be anyone who wanted the job. This naturally fell to the character with the most Charisma, a wholly narrative stat that decided how NPCs reacted to the PC. Who had the highest Charisma? That’s who the King would speak to, assuming them the representative of the group. Who would the Hag try to put in her cooking pot first? The person with the lowest Charisma.

The System can also be a part of giving your players clear options: Powered by the Apocalypse games have specific moves that become self-evident answers to the question of what happens next. Is someone shooting at you? You know you’re going to have to “escape danger,” so you roll to get your parameters (Success? Failure? With or without a complication?) and then your table can talk about what that looks like.

This is a long way of asking: is “what happens next” the right question to ask anymore? It’s a broad and all-encompassing question, designed for anyone to jump in and shape the story, but that isn’t always the best path forward. If VTTs and more focused systems are starting to nudge the medium away from this open-ended-ness, might we be better served by looking deeper into alternate best-practices?

I don’t have an answer, of course, but I think it’s a question worth asking.